by J M Gregson
We left here at about quarter to ten, I suppose. I was probably out for an hour or a little more. She likes me to go into the empty house before I leave her, to make sure there is no one in there.’
‘And where were you on the evening of Wednesday, June the twenty-fifth?’
‘At home, I expect. What happened then?’
‘Darren Chivers was beaten up and put in hospital for a couple of days. Two men were involved - maybe hired thugs. If so, they were probably employed by one of the man’s blackmail victims.’
‘By the man who killed him last Friday night.’
‘Quite probably, but not necessarily. Had you anything to do with that beating, Mr Beckford?’
‘No. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Someone was presumably trying to warn him off.’
‘Then either they weren’t successful, or some other victim decided to be rid of the man altogether. No policeman likes blackmailers, Mr Beckford. They cause their victims much anguish and give us a lot of work. Unfortunately, the law dictates that we like murderers even less.’ Lambert gave him a thin smile. ‘You made a bad start with us, Mr Beckford. I hope you are now being completely honest. Is there anything else you feel we should hear?’
‘No. I’ve a lot at stake here. I stand to lose not only a job I’ve grown to love, not just my work, but a house where my wife and I are very happy.’
‘DS Hook has already explained that we treat all the information we acquire as confidential. Unless we arrest you, there is no reason why your employers should learn anything of what you have told us. If you think of anything which may have a bearing on this investigation, it is your duty to contact us immediately.’
Bert Hook lingered for a moment after his chief had left the room, knowing that he would find him gazing at the huge tower of the cathedral from where they had parked the car. ‘Your wife knows all about the army stuff.’
‘Yes. You can’t hide an army court martial, with officers in blues and the married quarters alive with gossip. Not that I’d have wanted to. Gwen stood by me and was a massive help to me at that time.’
‘But I expect she doesn’t know about the blackmail.’ Robert wondered how this harmless-looking man could have such insights. ‘No. That was one of the problems. I was taking the money out of our joint account. I couldn’t have concealed any more payments.’ He realized in horror that he was building up his profile as a suspect.
But all Hook said was, ‘You should tell her, you know. Tell her about the strain you’ve been under. Secrets don’t help a marriage. I don’t believe you’ll have kept many things from her, until now.’
‘You’re right. I’ll tell Gwen all about it. She knows there’s something up, of course, but I haven’t told her about the blackmail, until now. Thank you.’ He reached out impulsively and grasped his adviser’s strong right hand. For a moment, they were comrades in the sergeants’ mess, rather than on opposite sides in a murder inquiry.
Lambert was studying the stone tracery on the massive stone cliff of the cathedral’s front elevation, as Bert had known he would be. He glanced at his colleague and friend curiously but not unkindly. ‘Been doing your counsellor act, Bert?’
‘Something like that, yes,’ said Bert Hook gruffly as he slid into the driving seat of the police Mondeo.
‘The human face of the police. I like it. I just hope you haven’t been counselling a murderer.’
‘So do I,’ said Bert. Then, as he started the engine, he added, ‘I’ve known one or two murderers whom I quite liked, over the years. I hope I don’t have to add Robert Beckford to the list.’
Twenty
Christine Lambert was too experienced a police wife to ask her husband about his work. If he wished to speak, the initiative must come from him. Twenty years and more ago, he had hugged his work to him like protective armour, working long hours and shutting her out completely from that part of his life. It had almost fractured the marriage which nowadays seemed so secure, such a model for more junior men, who so often found the exigencies of police work a passage to divorce.
In his fifties, John Lambert had become much more relaxed, confident that not a word of what he uttered would pass beyond the walls of the home where he had once found it so difficult to relax. He was a different animal now, Christine sometimes insisted. She said to him on Saturday morning, ‘You’ll be working this weekend, I expect.’
He glanced up from The Times and his perusal of the account of the Ashes test match. ‘I’m afraid I will, yes. We’re making progress, but it’s already a week since the man died.’
That old police watchword: if you didn’t have an arrest within the first week of a murder inquiry, the chances were that you wouldn’t get one at all. Christine couldn’t remember the statistics, but she understood the implications. ‘Try to make it for tea tomorrow, if you can. I was planning a family gathering. Jacky says she hasn’t seen Caroline and the children for months. It will only be salad. That’s not an invitation to be late, by the way.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll do my best to be there. Even for salad. Jacky’s well rid of that Jason.’
It was some months now since Lambert’s elder daughter had been deserted by her husband for a younger woman. Christine smiled a rueful smile. Despite her own more private doubts, she had always stood up for Jason against her husband’s misgivings, as long as he had been around. ‘She probably is well rid of him, but that doesn’t make it any less painful for her. Try to be there tomorrow, John - you know how close she’s always been to you.’
‘And I to her.’ He thought irrelevantly, uselessly, of the years when he had held Jacky’s small frame tight against his chest as she sobbed her eyes out over some crisis at school. How far away those years must seem to her, and how close they still were to him! The familiar lament of the ageing parent. He would be an old man before he knew it. ‘I must be about the work of the state and the detection of murder,’ he said with mock self-importance.
‘The cricket test highlights are on at seven fifteen,’ Christine reminded him. You had to encourage a proper sense of perspective in husbands.
Karen Lynch polished the brasswork of the altar rails vigorously, trying to dissipate her nervousness through the force of her physical energy. She limped over to Florence Jenkins, who was deftly arranging large pink carnations in two vases to be set in pride of place on the main altar.
‘I don’t know how you produce an effect like that so quickly,’ she said, as the older woman slipped an extra piece of asparagus fem behind the blooms to show them off to optimum effect.
‘You get used to it, after the first few hundred efforts!’ said Florence, who was a consistent winner in the floral arrangement classes at the local horticultural shows. ‘Ted doesn’t know yet, but I raided his greenhouse for these. He’ll grumble a bit, but he won’t really mind, if it’s for the church. I might even be able to drag him along to the service tomorrow, if I promise him his blooms will be on the high altar. Of course, he appreciates your husband’s sermons as well,’ she added hastily.
‘There’s no need to be polite, when you put in the time and the effort that you do, Florence - especially when you bring along your husband’s prize blooms as well!’ Karen assured her. She liked seventy-year-old Florence, who was ultraconservative in temperament but tried to remain resolutely open to Peter’s modem and liberal ideas. ‘I think Peter’s preparing his sermon in the vestry at this very moment, as a matter of fact. Fve sent him over here to get a little peace - you’d be surprised how many visitors we get at the vicarage on a Saturday morning.’
Including two she knew were coming at ten o’ clock. She didn’t want Peter or anyone else in the house when the CID men arrived.
She took them into the square, characterless room with the cheap modem furniture and the conventional prints of Rome and Venice on the walls. She rather liked this bright modem room. Its clean, aseptic character and the sunlight which flowed in through its window were an assertion of the blamelessness of her new lif
e, a physical contrast to that darker world of drugs and crime she had left behind her. But today the room seemed to her bare and clinical, a context where these men could concentrate on her weakness and mercilessly expose her past. She felt now as vulnerable as she had felt in those police interview rooms which had, years ago, been so familiar.
Perhaps Lambert sensed this, for he attacked immediately. ‘Mrs Lynch, I should tell you that we now know much more about Darren Chivers than when we saw you on Wednesday. Enough, in fact, to question the reliability of many of your statements to us at our last meeting. We know that Mr Chivers was not just a drug-dealer but a blackmailer. We think the list we found in his pocket contained the names of some of his blackmail victims. I have to remind you again that your name was on that list.’
This was as bad or worse than anything Karen had expected. She resisted automatically, trying to gain time to think. ‘Do I look like a woman who could be blackmailed?’ She looked down hopelessly at her jeans, at the smear of silver polish on her blouse from her cleaning in the church. ‘Do the furnishings in this place, the clothes I wear, speak of a woman with the resources to attract a blackmailer?’
She thought she caught the slightest inclination of Lambert’s long intense face towards the softer one beside it. Detective Sergeant Hook said, ‘Karen, you told us that the only possible place where you could have met Chivers was at St Mary’s Hostel, through the addicts that live there. That the only way you could have got on to that list in his pocket was because one of those people might have mentioned your name to him. We now believe that you had a much earlier acquaintance with Darren Chivers. I think you should take this opportunity of telling us about that and putting the record straight.’
He was quiet, insistent, seemingly sympathetic, so that even in her turmoil she heard his every word. She wondered if this was a speech he had prepared before they came here, whether this avuncular figure was playing a predetermined role even when he seemed so genuine in his concern. Whatever the reality was, Hook’s concerned tone seemed only to emphasize the hopelessness of further attempts to conceal the realities of that life she had sought to leave behind her. She said with dull resignation, ‘You know about how I once lived.’
‘We know a certain amount from police records, yes. We are not interested in mining them. What we need to know about is your previous and present dealings with Darren Chivers.’
‘I was an addict, Chivers was a dealer. The life I led then is part of another world, but it’s come back to haunt me, hasn’t it? I suppose I always knew it would. I’d like you to know that my husband knows all about the life I led then. Peter knows that in those days I’d have done anything for the next fix - that’s what being an addict means. I stole for heroin. I fucked for heroin.’ She spat out the obscenity she had not used for years, as if in a desperate attempt to purge herself. ‘That’s the way you are, when you’re an addict. All decent behaviour disappears.’
Hook wanted to hasten her on, but he sensed that this was a necessary first stage of her revelations. He said softly, ‘We’re not drug squad, but we’ve seen enough of horse and coke and the rest to know what they do to people. We know also that the cure is sometimes worse than the addiction. You came through that and fought your way back to a normal life.’
She looked up at him again, as if registering his presence anew through her private agony. ‘I’m older than Chivers was, you know. I was a dealer myself once. I’m not sure, but I might even have introduced him to dealing. When you were recruiting, you were told to look for users who would become dealers to get their next fix. It was the way the system worked. I expect it still is.’
‘So Chivers knew all about your previous life.’
‘I suspect Darren Chivers knew as much about my life at that time as anyone else on earth.’
‘And he decided to make use of that knowledge. He decided to add you to his list of blackmail victims.’
Hook made it a statement, not a question, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that she should admit it. It worked, because it suddenly seemed to Karen Lynch hopeless to deny it, though she had intended to do so when she entered the room. ‘I go down to St Mary’s Hostel to help Father Ryan on most Tuesday afternoons. Chivers tackled me in the street as I was walking back into the city centre. He told me he wanted money to keep his mouth shut about the life I had led, the person I had once been.’
‘And you paid him.’
She gave him a withering smile. ‘He wanted five hundred pounds. I told him he might as well ask for the moon. I can’t raise money like that. Peter and I live from hand to mouth as it is. I’m proud of what he does, proud that he regards money as secondary. But Darren Chivers told me I’d manage to raise the money from somewhere.’
‘And did you?’
‘No. I scratched together two hundred.’ Suddenly and unexpectedly, she found herself in tears. It took her a full half minute to regain control, during which neither of the men spoke. They had seen much human misery, but they knew full well that misery, like other extremes of human emotion, is often a prelude to revelations. Eventually Karen managed to explain her breakdown. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that this was the beginning of what Peter called our “baby fund”. We want to start a family as soon as we can afford it. This was the only money we had, and I was going to give it to a man like that to keep his mouth shut about the woman I’d been.’
‘You’d a lot at stake.’
‘I’d everything at stake, DS Hook. Peter knows all about my past life, but no one else does. If Chivers had exposed me, it wouldn’t just have been my life ruined, it would have been Peter’s. He’s making a success of things here, bringing people back into the church. All kinds of people. But his reputation as well as mine would have been ruined. The important people who run things here would think he’d deceived them. That he’d brought a junkie and a harlot into their vicarage without warning them.’
‘I think people might be a little more forgiving than you think. There’s great admiration for someone who’s made the kind of recovery you’ve made.’
‘The Mary Magdalen effect, you mean? People find that idea romantic, until they have to take on such a woman themselves. Peter says they’d welcome the reformed sinner. I wouldn’t like him to have to test that theory.’
‘But in the end you didn’t have to take your two hundred along to Chivers.’
‘No. Someone kindly removed him. I can’t rejoice in the death of anyone, but I can’t deny my relief.’
She had almost forgotten the intense attention of John Lambert in her preoccupation with reliving her own agony through Hook’s promptings. It was the chief superintendent who now said, ‘Let’s be clear about this. Are you telling us now that the single occasion when you saw Darren Chivers was when he approached you in the street after you left St Mary’s Hostel?’
‘Yes. He said I had a week to get five hundred pounds together. As I said, I’d scratched together two hundred in the ten days before he was killed, but he hadn’t contacted me again.’ She was staring straight ahead of her, as if she could still not believe that her agony was over. ‘Will it come out now? My past, I mean. Will it all come tumbling out when you arrest someone for this?’
‘Not from us it won’t. If you’re involved in a murder inquiry, all kinds of things become public. In the meantime, if the press come sniffing around, you should resolutely refuse them any kind of comment.’
Michelle de Vries should have been exultant. It had been a busy Saturday at Boutique Chantelle and she had made several lucrative sales. The shop was becoming known. Two of the customers had journeyed over forty miles to examine the latest stock and make their purchases.
She was grateful for such success, of course. Perhaps within a year the shop would be making a reasonable net profit and no longer relying on her husband’s financial support. But Michelle could not get Darren Chivers and the murder investigation out of her mind. Those polite, watchful detectives who had come to her shop on Wednesd
ay loomed like spectres in her mind, so that she constantly expected them to reappear and confront her with the evidence of her dishonesty.
Instead of the CID men, she had another, more unexpected, visitor as the crowds began to thin in the streets of the ancient city. It was a visitor who in happier times would have filled her day with joy. Today she would quickly sense that it was something very different from joy he brought.
Guy Dawson, normally so confident, slipped like a fugitive into her shop, glancing theatrically behind him to make sure he was unobserved before he shut the door on the world outside. He said, ‘I’m glad you’re on your own!’ and gave her a passionless peck on the cheek before leading her through to the storeroom behind the shop, where they would be unobserved.
‘It’s good to see you, Guy! This is a bit of a bonus for me.’
She reached out both arms towards him. ‘I’ve already had a good day in the shop, and now that you’ve come—’
‘Have the police been back?’
‘No. I think they must be satisfied with what 1 told them. Perhaps we—’
‘Not “we”. You’re-on your own in this. I don’t want you implicating me with them in any way.’
She recoiled as if he had struck her. ‘I didn’t implicate you. They knew Chivers had been watching your house. They knew that it was because of you that he was able to blackmail me.’ Like many weak men, he wouldn’t accept logic when he was confronted with it. ‘All I know is that you told them about us. Dragged me into this.’
For the first time that she could remember, she lost her temper with him. ‘That’s ridiculous! I might as well say that you dragged me into it. We’re conducting an extramarital affair, and you take risks when you get into such things. Of course, you could come out into the open and let Gerald know about it. Then no one would be able to blackmail us.’